Never Cry Human
Worlds of IF – January-February 1971
(1971)*
Sterling E. Lanier

Always know your enemy—but know yourself even better!

-

I

	THE great blue sun was a long way from the planet called after it, Origen VII. As he ran heavily over the hot sand under its glare, William Powers, Field Agent of Survey and Contact Bureau, Syrian Combine, thanked the One God that its heat was no worse. It barely approximated 105° F on Terra. Even so, only Powers' superb condition enabled him still to keep moving at the steady trot he was forcing himself to maintain.

	Beside him the lean, seven-foot form of his Lyran partner sped on with no visible effort, flexible tail streaming behind him, slender five-clawed toes making only a faint rustle in the black sand of the canyon's floor, a noise imperceptible to anyone but the man running beside him. Powers could barely hear the thud of his heart but he had no trouble with the crunch of his feet as the plastic sandals bit into the ground and occasional patches, of naked rock over which the two ran. Sweat poured from his nearly naked body. It was kept from his eyes by a crude headband, hastily made of cloth torn from the coat of his vanished uniform. Other than this, sandals and his calf-length service pants, he wore nothing at all.

	In the waste all was still save for the two running figures. Above them, on both sides, the towering walls of the mighty gorge rose sheer and stark, black and red rock making a pattern of ferocious beauty. Except for an occasional gray cactus—like shrub clinging to the rock or rooted in some crevice, no vegetation was visible. Down the almost straight hundred-foot width of the canyon floor the two ran, as if competing in some strange contest.

	In another quarter of a mile

	Powers stole a glance at his wristchron.

	"Break," he croaked and came to an abrupt stop.

	The Lyran checked at once and whirled in one easy motion to look back up the canyon, his long tail curling gracefully as he did so. Seeing nothing, he turned his great red goggle eyes on his human companion, his immobile, snouted face looking like nothing as much as a magnified head of a Terran chameleon. But there was both intelligence and concern in the huge, lambent orbs as he saw how Powers panted while he crouched on one knee.

	"Bill," he said in Universal, making it sound more like Hipeel, "you don't look so good. Can you last much longer?"

	"Why in hell, you overgrown skink, you don't get out of here, is beyond me," gasped Powers. "How much water you got left?"

	The Lyran examined the skin water bag slung over one bony shoulder.

	"Maybe a quart. Maybe a touch more. Want some?"

	"Yeah," said the man, holding up one hand for the water. He drank rapid gulps of the muddy, lukewarm fluid and handed the skin back in silence. The olive-scaled Lyran stood above him, lean double-ankled legs locked as he braced himself on his long stiffened tail, the whole forming a rigid triangle on which to rest. In this portion he also shaded Powers from the sun but neither one mentioned it, any more than he did the fact that only Powers had used the water.

-

	SAHK MAZZECHAZZ was a native of Beta Lyrae IV or Zzorm, an ancient, arid planet, a world not unlike the Karoo desert of Southern Africa over much of its expanse. He needed little water at any time and the hot blue glare of giant Origen bothered him hardly at all. It was the man who was in really bad trouble and they both knew it. There was no need to make any comment. The help was an automatic reflex and on a different, perhaps wetter, world, would have been as freely given in reverse.

	Powers' breath had subsided to normal and he checked his chron again.

	"Let's go," he said, coming to his feet. "I've had five minutes and we haven't got time to hang around. We don't know what those hellions turned loose after us. We only have the one chance and we need cover."

	"Quiet a moment, please," said the Lyran. He was now standing fully erect and his broad, plate-like tympanum surfaces, far more sensitive than human ears to vibration, were quivering as he strained to catch a sound. Powers waited, also staring up canyon. He could see and hear nothing. The shimmering haze, caused by heat reflected off the rocks arid sand, made visibility almost nil more than two hundred yards away.

	"Yes," said Mazzechazz after a moment. "Something comes, something large and with many limbs, my friend. We had best resume our journey. We can do nothing here."

	The two began to run down canyon again, their eyes ceaselessly scanning the terrain ahead and on either side. They needed an ambush spot, anything at all that would give them a chance against whatever horror had been loosed on their trail. A chance to use their one weapon.

	As he ran Powers cursed the grim humor of the Arghor war chiefs to himself, not for the first time. They had carefully deprived the two agents of all their weapons, even down to knives, leaving them only a food pack, water and a limited amount of clothing. Two items of Powers' personal jewelry had been overlooked or considered unimportant. One was his wristchron, the other the large Space Academy ring he wore, set with a green stone. Next, the Arghor had left them at the head of the great gorge and told them to run.

	"One comes perhaps, whom it would not be well to meet," the oldest chief had growled jovially and all the surrounding warriors had yelped in what passed for delighted laughter, some even slapping their black-furred thighs in a fair approximation of mirth.

	For the tenth time since their capture at the end of the previous night, Powers had, with dignity, pointed out that he and the Lyran had the status of ambassadors and that the sky gods would curse any who harmed such.

	"We have harmed no one, Sky-dweller," snarled the old chief venomously. "You came unasked, out of nowhere, on behalf of other irreligious, muck-eating monsters like yourselves down on the plain yonder. Whom we will kill in due course. You claim to be heralds, ambassadors? We asked for none, nor were we asked by your people to receive any. We found you at night lurking on our land near your sky machine, doubtless engaged in some vile sky-people plot. We could kill you at once without losing honor. This one with you looks like an evil spirit.

	"But you are heralds, you say? Perhaps. We will release you then. If you are true warriors you need no cowardly death beams," and he pointed a massive, pelted hand at the two Ferraby handlasers lying on the ground.

	"Let us have our knives then, Eldest," rejoined Powers, staring impassively into the angry yellow eyes. "If you leave us defenseless entirely, then who will be the coward?"

	"No!" roared the angry old chief. Standing so close to Powers that his sharp-snouted, hairy face was only inches away. "No—we give you a chance for life, no more. You deserve no more, like all the dirty leaf and root eaters in your tribe. If you are true people, true hunters, make the most of it and save yourselves. Otherwise, die here and now."

	"We are ready," interrupted the Lyran. He had been standing, arms folded, not speaking, while Powers argued. Now he took Powers by the arm and gently pulled him back.

	The Unitrans machine which had taught them both to speak the Arghor dialect could not help to make the barks, growls and grunts as fluent for the reptilian mouth of the Lyran, but the tribemen nevertheless fell silent when he spoke. Humans they were used to seeing, but Mazzechazz was uncanny, and the fact that he could speak to them in their own tongue made them even more nervous. They were not afraid, exactly, but there was a grudging respect in their attitude toward the towering lizard shape that was absent in their attitude toward Powers.

	"Go then," grunted the old chief, "You have been given food and a skin of water. If you escape from the Hunter of the Sands we will kill you later—but in fair fight. Now go."

	Powers turned and followed his partner down the crude vine ladder to the canyon floor far below. At the bottom he looked up, expecting to see the assembled tribe gazing down, prick-eared in the clear light of the coming dawn. But the ladder was hauled up by invisible hands and then there was nothing. The Arghors had vanished, apparently uninterested.

	"I think we had better run, friend," said Mazzechazz gently, taking the unspoken thought from his mind. "They surely would like to see us die—and that means they are probably extremely scared of what's coming. They are not hanging around to see how we'll make out."

-

	NOW, three hours later, they had been running, running and running, thought Powers. And still they had found no position for making a stand. The level bottom of the canyon had stayed smooth, large, flat rocks alternating with fine gravel and sand, but with no break or usable crevice in the towering walls. The gentle downward slope never varied or ceased. Only the timed rests and his iron will had kept Powers from collapsing, but Sakh Mazzechazz could still go a long way. Powers knew that the big Lyran ought to have left him but he had given up arguing. The other had made it plain that he was not going to desert his partner for any reason whatsoever, mission or no mission.

	As he pounded grimly and undeviatingly along, Powers tried to keep his mind off his straining muscles and laboring breath by recasting the events of the past few cycles in his mind. Everything had happened quickly—too quickly.

	While returning from a pirate scan near the outer Magellanics he and his teammate, Mazzechazz, had been beeped by a subdimensional probe, matching velocities with their two-man, deep-space Farover. The powered message capsule, actually a tiny ship keyed to a molecular frequency in their own vessel's construction, had been taken aboard, stored for return to base, its coded contents read.

	The message had come through the subspace dimension from H.Q. on Sirius Prime. It seemed that no Word had been received for three weeks, Universal time, from a new human colony on a Terra-type world called Origen VII.

	The colony was one of the products of an influential religious body, the Methodist Revival Templars, a group originating on old Terra in the distant past, still with Terran headquarters, but powerful on other worlds also. The Templars were ancient Christian in their remote antecedents and gave their clergy a lot of authority. A strongly pacific—even pacifist—sect, they had a previous record of planting useful and healthy colonies on a number of worlds suitable for agriculture. They did not despise scientific technology but favored the simple life.

	Although the colony was human, the- native inhabitants of Origen VII were not, although they were classified as clearly mammalian. Pictures and data on the planet, its ecology, resources and all other pertinent matters were included in the message. The Templar colony had been supposed to report twice a (Universal) week, but via sub-space radio, not capsule. Mission for Powers and Mazzechazz: Go find out what was wrong and either report or -take appropriate action. Coordinates were given. That was all.

-

	THE silent colony on Origen VII proved easy enough to locate. Set in a valley at the base of a mountainous and rugged peninsula on the larger of the two northern continents, it could be picked up easily on a clear night by its blaze of light. No natural satellite circled the planet to give light and the glow of the settlement was very plain. Farover landed easily, flickering out of the black sky into a glare of flood lights at the edge of what quickly revealed itself as a brand-new, defensive perimeter.

	Heavily armed men, their faces haggard with strain, had swarmed around the ship as soon as it touched down. On emergence, the two Survey agents were caught up in a babbling crowd of excited people, all talking at once and were rushed almost off their feet to the office of the colony's governor, who was also its chief priest. Behind them as they went, Powers noticed guards digging still more trenches and laying wire around the S. and C. ship, enclosing it in the zone of defense.

	When all others but the six members of the governor's council had been excluded and a guard had been posted outside, the two agents were finally able to ask questions. At least, so they thought.

	Governor Halk Tahira, -Presbyter of the Faith, was a man of late middle age and, if Powers were any judge, late middling experience and intelligence as well. He had been ready to explode for days and waited no longer.

	"Do you know what's been going on here?" he had shouted rhetorically. "This place was cleared, pronounced safe by all official sources. Safe and harmless! The natives were listed as 'primitive, semi-nomadic indigenes, mammalian type, humanoid in structure and intelligence and friendly to outside contacts!' Friendly! Humanoid! That's what the official report said. "Do you know what we call this place? Wolf World!"

	He had raved on. And since Powers and Mazzechazz were learning something from his attitude they made no move to interrupt. Finally he ran down, more from lack of wind than emotion and the real questions started. Allowing for hysteria and shock, what had been allowed to happen seemed bad enough, in all truth. Someone, and it looked like Survey and Contact, which bore the responsibility for the first reports, had goofed, but good.

	The natives of Origen VII were semi-nomadic all right—carnivores at various levels of Stone Age culture, who ate nothing but meat unless literally starving. Cannibalism was usually a matter of ritual but perfectly acceptable if the meat were an enemy warrior of one's one tribal group. The planet provided a variety of environments, all of them swarming with large and small game. Most of the big game animals and their attendant predators were highly dangerous themselves. You worked for your dinner.

	At first friendly enough, the natives had swiftly become contemptuous on discovering that the humans were omnivores whose basic diet was vegetable, who did not eat each other and failed to see hand-to-hand combat as the only hobby for an idle moment.

	The natives were erect, bipedal and possessed five digits on what a zoologist would style manus and pes or hand and foot. Opposable thumbs were present.

	In general appearance and at a fast look the natives resembled nothing so much as human-sized, black dogs walking upright, although they wore harnesses of leather and made sophisticated bone and stone tools. They lived in palisaded villages, used fire and were quite as intelligent as any member race of the Syrian Combine.

	Their economy was strictly primitive, however, and since they actually occupied a very small share of the planet's total surface, the Combine Xenological Bureau had given permission for a colony, subject to the usual safeguards. These, were designed to protect the natives, be it stated, and not the colony.

	The Grawm, as the race styled itself, was anything but united. Primitives almost never are and the natives of Origen VII were no exception.

-

	THE particular body of Grawm who called themselves Arghor, was a widespread confederacy of ten tribes, numbering perhaps a bit less than ten thousand warriors. As part of their hunting grounds they owned the peninsula on which the human settlement had been placed. Sparked by anti-vegetarian disgust and apparently urged on by a powerful (and hitherto unsuspected) shamanic priesthood, they had attacked the colony in broad daylight a month earlier. Despising humans and unaware of what advanced technology possessed in the way of weapons, the Arghor warriors had relied on head-on charges.

	At tremendous cost to themselves, the "Wolves" had penetrated to the governor's quarters, destroying the subspace radio shack en route and by mere chance. When they were finally driven out, ninety-two men, twenty-two women and eleven children were dead or missing. Merely wounded in one degree or another were two hundred and ten more. An estimated, thousand Arghor, all fighting males, had been killed, mostly by close-range laser fire.

	Now the colony had been placed under a loose but effective siege. At first individual Arghor warriors tried to kill Templar sentries at night, for both weapons and prestige. A jury-rigged radar network had quickly put a stop to this practice. It was now safe to move around the colony perimeter, but that was all. No hunting was possible except by airboat and the boats had to land and retrieve anything killed at once. The seven existing airboats could hardly feed the eight hundred people who remained in any case, and the emergency food stocks were already half gone. The speed-growth crops on which the colony had relied for the coming season were totally destroyed, the fields stamped flat by the enraged Arghor. All in all, Powers had reflected, a fairly messy situation.

	He was not unaware of the psychic damage either. Peaceful people, who hated violence, had been forced to kill and had seen loved ones killed as well. This was as much a tragedy as the purely physical aspects of what had happened.

	He had interrupted the fuming governor at this point in the story and inquired what that ecclesiastic official thought ought to be done.

	"Ought to be done?" spluttered Presbyter Tahira angrily. Powers decided Tahira was a standard Mark I bureaucrat—overweight, confused and helpless in an emergency.

	"We should get a battleship, Marines, heavy lasers, clear this end of the peninsula," the governor had suggested, his voice rising. Other members of the council had joined in. "Paralysis beams—null rays—grabbers—rover bombs—"

	The babble had slowly died away as it became apparent that Powers and Mazzechazz were simply sitting, saying nothing, waiting. Finally the room was silent again.

-

	"NOW Reverend Presbyter," Powers had said. "I'll tell you what we're actually going to do. You Templars, despite your religion and its training, all seem to have forgotten the Combine Charter. This is not your world, unless the intelligent inhabitants want you. This they no longer do. Whose fault your coming here was originally means nothing, understand me, nothing." He had stared coldly at the council and no eyes had met his. The Lyran had waited quietly. This was human business.

	Powers then continued. "My partner "and I will try to fix up this mess. Peaceably. You people can defend yourselves if attacked and that is absolutely all. I am assuming military command of this post. Does anyone oppose my authority for so doing?" Again there was silence. No one had wished to go on record as opposing Survey and Contact Field Agents. The reputation of the Corps insured that. In addition, the reminder of their religion and its teachings was not making them deeply ashamed.

	Reinstalling the governor as commandant, but this time as his deputy, Powers had filed a sub-space report of the situation to Prime base from the ship's radio. After ordering an emergency supply ship to leave at once and outlining his procedures and ideas as part of the report, Powers had not waited for an answer. The two S. and C. specialists had decided to head for the main Arghor encampment that very night and start the ball rolling. He and Mazzechazz had taken one of the colony's airboats and landed on the rim of the plateau about a mile from the blaze of fires marking the main Arghor camp.

	Several canyons and gorges ran up from the end of the peninsula and the human settlement's location to the top of the massif. The Arghor apparently were based in a whole series of camps, in the mountains and sent their warriors down to attack the off-worlders in rotation.

	At any rate, with less than one more Universal period left of the local, or four-day, night, Powers and Mazzechazz decided to try a sneak survey of the main enemy position. They landed, seemingly undetected. Only the cry of some distant bird thing and the hum of insects had broken the velvet darkness.

	As the airboat touched down gently on the grass of the plateau a local mammoth-sized herbivore had burst, trumpeting loudly, out of an adjacent clump of brush and trampled heavily on and over the rear or engine part of the machine before galloping ponderously into the surrounding gloom. In no more than five seconds, before they had even left the airboat, the two agents had been robbed of ninety percent their mobility.

	Badly shaken around and battered though they were, yet no real bodily injury had occurred. Feeling more or less safe, both from the distance to the enemy camp and the presence of the hulking brute which had smashed their aircraft, Powers and the Lyran had started to examine the damage to the little vessel. They later agreed that one of them should have manned the combat radar, but by the time the hide lassos had dropped neatly out of the black night and over their shoulders it had been a bit late to worry about it.

	Caught by an alert Arghor hunting party, which had chanced to be downwind of their landing, Terran and Lyran had been dragged before the hastily summoned Assembly of Chiefs, stripped and sentenced, all in one operation. As dawn came up they had gone down into the canyon.

-

II

	THE two runners rounded a sharp bend in the gorge—and both abruptly halted, looking at each other as the topography sank in. This was the first sharp corner they had found since starting.

	"Do you think we can do better?" hissed Mazzechazz. "We have perhaps five minutes before it comes."

	"This looks quite possible," said Powers absently. In front of him were two hugh, steep-sided rocks, giant boulders over twenty feet high, which almost blocked the whole canyon. The last flash flood must have failed to move them farther down the canyon floor. A narrow gap between the rocks—only about six feet wide—constituted the sole pathway to whatever lay beyond.

	Walking through this opening and pacing it, Powers estimated its depth at about ten feet and the distance to the corner they had just rounded at double that.

	"This is okay," he said. "We can relax, I think, unless what's coming is a lot tougher than it has any right to be. Should be quite killable on a Terranorm planet though."

	"It comes now," said the Lyran and proceeded to crouch low at the downcanyon base of one of the great stones, the one to the right. His tail was coiled neatly about his ankles and his great eyes were covered by his long-fingered hands.

	The man stepped out into the middle of the gap and waited. He finished very carefully removing the large stone, an oval green Cad-mean fire eye, from the ring on his right third finger. As he looked upcanyon he hefted the stone in his right hand, keeping his thumb and index finger pressed on it. He could hear the rustling himself now—it was rapidly becoming louder and louder.

	Powers poised for action.

	Around the corner of the cliff appeared two immense whiplike antenna, a sickly blue in color. They were followed by a great, flat head surmounted by two monstrous pupilless eyes, also blue. From mighty mandibles at the front of the head drooled a foul-scented ichor as the creature paused to examine the puny-looking prey, which seemed to await it with such confidence. Six great, jointed legs, tipped with spiked claws, and then an armored, ten-foot body slowly followed the, awful head around the corner. Powers and the beast were now no more than fifteen feet apart.

	"Down!" shouted the Terran and hurled the three-quarter inch stone square, flat and low, at the nightmare head. Even as he released the tiny trigger pressed down underneath the stone, he was diving to the left for the shelter of the other great rock. He fell prone—face ground into the sand—behind it as the tiny Osmium wrecker bomb went into its nuclear cycle, exactly on target. The huge boulder actually shifted in its bed next to him and a blast of superheated air came over its top and around the sides. Powers, his eyes tightly shut, hugged the sand as the terrific heat of the almost soundless explosion eddied around his body and the sand swirled over his naked back and shoulders. His eardrums ached from the pressure of the blast.

	"Get up, Bill," said Mazzechazz. "It worked."

-

	POWERS scrambled to his feet, somewhat embarrassed by the fact that he had not yet realized it was safe to do so. He found the big Lyran standing in the gap between the two mammoth stones. The sand on which his clawed feet rested was now covered by a thin film of fused, black glass, a mute tribute to the tiny bomb's intense heat.

	The two looked back up canyon but except for a scorched area,, fifty feet across, where sand and rock had flowed together, there was nothing to be seen.

	"Superscorp seems to have bought it," acknowledged Powers. There was not a speck of matter to show that the giant arthropod had ever existed, so savage had been the instant furnace created by the nuclear Osmium.

	"That's the second time that ring has saved my life," said Powers, turning away. "Give me a swallow of the water and let's go. If my bearings are right, we should make the base camp in three more hours, provided the Wolves don't pick us off first."

	"They probably have the camp ringed by scouts," said Mazzechazz, passing over the canteen. "We know how good they are. Why not signal, use smoke or something and call down one of the three big airboats they have left?"

	"The Arghor could reach us a lot quicker, I suspect."

	They both glanced up at the rims of the gorge, far above against the white sky, but no sign of life or movement could be seen there. Some winged creatures circled higher still, probably the local analog of vultures. The oppressive heat of Origen, the great, blue sun, still lay all around them.

	The man drank some lukewarm water and considered, while the Lyran waited. Of the two, Mazzechazz was the profounder thinker, the philosopher-logician, the chess player. He was also the memory bank, a living library of history and technology, spanning many races and worlds besides his own. But in a situation calling for lightning action, reflex moves and brutal cunning Homo sapiens had still not met a peer in the galaxy. Powers was the decision maker here by mutual consent. Just as he had cold-bloodedly risked annihilation for years by wearing a long-outlawed nuke ringstone, so he now ran the combat situation on a moment-to-moment basis.

	In this case his decision stayed fixed. "We have a better chance trying it on foot," he decided aloud. "They won't be expecting us and I'm pretty sure the whole tribe back at the main camp thinks we're dead. We got caught good when the airboat was stomped— but I'm damned if I think any primitive can beat us at scouting when we really work at it."

	Without another word they set off down the canyon again. They now possessed no weapon at all, save for their wits, but the prospect of meeting another ravening life form daunted neither of them. They were trained to do all they could and not worry about what could not be helped. Worrying, as opposed to forethought, clouded the mind. A clouded mind could mean bad reaction time and that got you killed. So, at a trot calculated to save energy, the two agents loped along, looking for the next obstacle.

-

	TEN Universal hours later Powers was as tired as he had ever been in his sometimes very active life. He and his partner were uncomfortably ensconced in a giant tree, about a half-mile from the fortified outer zone of the Templar settlement. To all appearances, as far as their getting to home base safely went, they might as well have been on the other side of the planet.

	They had emerged earlier from the mouth of the canyon to find themselves in more or less dense forest, although moving in the right direction for ultimate safety. Realizing that they probably stood a good chance of being slaughtered on the ground by native predators, if not by the Arghor, they had taken to the towering trees and moved more or less easily along through them toward the base. Their alien order pro ably helped keep what animals they saw at a distance.

	But now, out of water and hungry, they seemed stuck and could see no way to go farther. Arghor sentries, easily spotted from high above, were spread all around the section of base perimeter the two could observe. The offworld agents had managed to count nine of them, in a layer three deep, crouched in immobile watchfulness. The warriors were not too close to one another laterally; that is, each file of three formed a rather isolated line extending out from the base to the forest's edge, each of the enemy being about one hundred and fifty feet apart. With the wolf people's keen scent and hearing the formation appeared an effective one. It was hard to see how man and Lyran could get by without detection.

	"Suppose we went between two of the files?" said Powers in a whisper.

	"Then both sets would hear or smell us," said Mazzechazz. "But I have an idea. These are very proud, independent creatures, William. They dislike calling for help unless desperate. Many savages act so. Now suppose we come down, you in front and then—"

	Powers' answering whisper grew excited.

	An hour later they were hailing the Templar sentries manning the perimeter. And then minutes after that they were relaxing in air-conditioned privacy on their own ship.

	"I'm amazed that anything that obvious worked," mumbled Powers as he chewed away at the second large steak he had cooked. Across the dining table, Mazzechazz was eating spiced, processed fruit. His people had never been carnivores, or at least not since a stage analogous to a shrew in human evolution.

	He finished a portion of something purple and juicy and flicked a handful of seeds out of his mouth with his slender tongue before answering.

	"Psychology, William, psychology. Action is not everything. What could be simpler? You walk up to a sentry, naked, unarmed and hands in the air. By the way, there is food for thought in this area of defenselessness. I must consider it. 

	"To resume, can he kill you? No, - you are helpless, he has-to talk, figure things out, try to understand why you are out there coming from the wrong direction. This is too much of a puzzle. In the half-minute it takes to think of asking for advice, not help, mind you, advice, I, the quieter moving of the two, have eased up behind him and throttled him into insensibility. The sentries in the files to left and right have heard nothing and the two remaining in his own line but nearer to camp have not been called. He gets tied up, I take his knife for insurance and we repeat the performance twice more, all the way into camp. Psychology!" He selected a package of Terran figs and carefully opened it, transparent nictitating membranes snapping over his eyes in anticipation. For a while the two ate in silence.

	At last, his belt groaning, Powers leaned back and reached for a pipe.

	"So now what? We managed to get out safe and sound, but that's all. Got any ideas?

	"It seems to me," he went on, without waiting for the other to speak, "that we have to recommend evacuation. The Arghor are intelligent, quite highly intelligent, even if they've only arrived at the Neolithic. They now detest humans and want to kill them all. It's their planet and they have the right to do so if the humans remain. The humans, under Syrian Combine law, do not have the right to kill the Arghor, even in self defense, once they, the humans that is, have been officially told to leave and the Combine has evaluated the situation and agreed. Which would seem to make evacuation the only possibility. Someone is going to get a very noisy kick in the pants over this," he added. "I mean the S. and C. team that recommended this hell hole for colonization. And that's our service responsibility. The whole of Survey and Contact is going to look awfully incompetent when this news gets out. Even the Bureau can't keep this one quiet. There are too many people and departments involved, Xenological, Colonization—all those, et-cetra." He subsided, stoking his pipe with black Cannicotea antarea, lighting it and emitting clouds of lavender smoke.

-

	THE Lyran ran his tongue around his wide, lipless mouth, pushed the empty food containers away and leaned back in his hammock, supple tail curling neatly around the stanchion which supported one end of it.

	"Don't be so gloomy, William," he said gently. "We have only been here a little over one cycle. Besides, if my ideas are correct, there should be no real trouble about this colony. A little thought is what is needed, a little philosophy, a little history, and a little psychology. Something workable exists in our common store of experience for every eventuality. We have only to tap the proper circuit."

	"Have you got something to use all that quickly?" said Powers. "Short of driving the Arghor out of an area and erecting a large force field, I can't think of anything."

	"There are several possibilities," said the Lyran. "They are perhaps eighty percent carnivorous, or even more, from the recorded data. We could quite easily remove most of the game animals from any given area, perhaps drive the animals out with contact sonics. The Arghor would also have to move or starve."

	"That's interference with a native intelligent life form. Destroying or moving their food supply is hardly noninterference, is it?"

	"All right," rejoined Mazzechazz. "But it's not lethal and surely allowable."

	"Not, and I stress this point," said Powers smugly, "unless the people or civilization or culture or what have you constitute a menace to the peace of the civilized universum. From "constitute" on, that's a quote from our own manual, which you know better than I do." He leaned back and .exhaled more of the pungent smoke. Since Lyrans have no powers of scent worth mentioning, Mazzechazz had never noticed the aroma of Powers' pipe, which made many other beings as well as humans ill.

	"Mmm, quite so, William. But I never really intended this proposal seriously. I simply wished to indicate that there are any number of solutions to any given problem and that we should be exploring them and not trying to evade our duty. We need to reason matters through, not simply report that matters are hopeless."

	Powers tried to look thoughtful.

	All that came to his mind was a desire to rest, which was not very helpful. The Lyran, however, had a modest share of the strange telepathic talent of his race.

	"Go lie down," he said. "I don't feel tired. When you wake up I'll give you a dozen solutions, all good. Then you can explain why none of them will work. Yet one of them will be correct. The clue I will leave you to dream over is this: the answer lies in ancient Terra, in your own past."

-

	THE following day, local time*(* Four Universal 28-hour (Terran) periods equal one Origen VII day or night. In the human colony Universal Time based on this cycle was maintained artificially, since the days and nights were simply too long for human activities. The Grawm were largely diurnal but not entirely so.), was busy indeed. Once persuaded that the weird proposal made by Mazzechazz was quite legitimate and even practical, Powers had to sell it to the governor and council of the Templars. He knew that if these men, particularly the Presbyter-governor, could be convinced, the rest of the colony would follow. The debate was long.

	"Presbyter, I am not a member of your splendid religion," he said, trying a new argument, "but isn't there a saying 'Oh, Ye of little faith—' in your holy book?"

	"Yes, there is," said Tahira sourly. "However, you are offering an explanation based on science not religion. And if you are wrong we will all perish miserably, women and children as well."

	"All the Research and Biological authorities we have messaged on Prime Base bear my partner out," countered Powers. "They also say that if the plan is not tried the only alternative is to recommend immediate evacuation. The colony will be completely written off and the planet will become an educatable ward of the Syrian Combine. Perhaps it will be opened to colonization again by some more reasonable, adaptable group." Always save the sting for the tail, the psych books said.

	"Further," he continued, "your remark about all perishing is silly. There is some danger to a few of us—those out in front—I agree. I will be out there in front, you know, with whoever volunteers from your colony. The extrapolation based on BuPsych readings says about twenty men should be enough. No women or kids need be involved at all."

	"Suppose they use missile weapons, spears maybe, from a distance?" said a younger council member; one of the smarter ones, Powers recalled.

	"They'll be barred from doing so for two reasons," said Powers. "One, we'll be away out in a part of your fields near no cover when they spot us. Two, they kill hand-to-hand from preference. We'll be isolated, almost naked and empty-handed when they first see us working. The results will surprise you, I guarantee.

	"Look," he went on, "Sakh and I dug up one of the dead Arghor you buried and dissected him right down to his capillaries. These are pure and simple pack carnivores, only a lot more intelligent than the four-footed variety you and I are used to. In fact, let's face it, in lots of ways, as intelligent as you or I. No species precisely like them has been encountered up to this point, but they obviously had to appear at some point just because of the law of averages. And as Sakh points out, they're a picture-book example of what had been predicted they would be like if they ever did appear. "They live in tribes, which are little more than extended families or clans, rather like Terran primitives.

	"The Amerindians of old Noramerica," said a hitherto silent councilor.

	"Exactly," said Powers, glad of any support, however vague and qualified. "To go on, they possess a high degree of what used to be called chivalry. They never harm the females, the aged and the young in their battles with each other. War is a sport for healthy males only. Again, there are numerous Terran parallels."

-

	"AGENT  POWERS, assuming that what you have said earlier is correct, this last obviously is totally wrong," sneered the Presbyter. 'They killed every child and woman they could reach in the battle. A number are just plain missing and you have admitted that they were probably carried off to be eaten. Is this an example of your so-called chivalry?"

	Patiently Powers returned to the scientific explanation he had presented earlier in the day.

	"There again are two points to take note of, Presbyter, One, what were women and children doing during the attack? Two, what is the Arghor view of human beings, inculcated by both your food habits and by the arguments of their priests, wizards or whatever you want to call them?

	"Don't answer," he went on. "I know what happened and so do you. When attacked by hairy, savage monsters the women and kids fought. Who wouldn't?" I agree entirely. But if they had known more, if they had been trained, they would not have fought at all. All they had to do was what I've told you. "Sakh and I took an Arghor prisoner some twelve standard hours ago and we went through his mind up, down and sideways. We know the Arghor, I tell you, and Sakh's idea is pure genius—which is nothing more than intuition, memory and scientific knowledge all coalesced. You have to try this or go home with your tails between your legs, beaten by a bunch of primitives and savages."

	The Templar councilors stared at one another for a few seconds without speaking. Powers leaned back in his chair, projecting a good imitation of casualness and tried not to look at the silent Lyran across the table. He, in turn, had no trouble appearing calm. A reptilian face seldom displays emotion in any way a human can read.

	Powers was aware that his last shot had been fired. And he had managed to conceal a major source of his concern from the council—the fact that Survey and Contact would get a public black eye if the colony were forced to leave. This was something to avoid at all costs. Now he could do nothing but wait. But in truth, the decision had already been made. The Presbyter-governor broke the silence.

	"It means only risking twenty men, I suppose, and we have lost many more. We need eighteen volunteers, gentlemen."

	"You mean twenty, don't you, Reverend, sir?" said a council member.

	"Agent Powers and I make two," said the governor drily. He met Powers' eyes squarely for the first time and even managed the ghost of a smile.

	Powers said, "I'm honored."

	The details were easily settled. The long local night was coming to an end. The idea would be tested at dawn by Powers and the others. Mazzechazz would remain in command of the perimeter, most of which would be unguarded. Save for the party of exposed men who had volunteered; there should be no real danger to the rest of the humans on the planet. And in last analysis, the Farover possessed enough armament to stand off with ease anything the whole Arghor confederacy could summon up. But it was not supposed to come to that. There was going to be no violence at all, Powers told himself silently as the meeting broke up-^not the slightest bit of violence.

-

III

	PRETENDING to hoe a chewed-up, rock-strewn piece of what had once been a Templar grain field in the pitch dark just before dawn, Powers was not quite so sure.

	He and Governor Tahira, plus eighteen other nervous men had shipped out in the colony's air-boats a half-hour earlier. They had been dumped, almost naked and armed only with wooden sticks, in the middle of what had been the Templar's agricultural area, over a mile from the nearest woods. They were all pretending to hoe.

	Powers concentrated on mental calisthenics and recited twelve Vegan verse palindromes backward, chopping savagely at the ground as he did so. He could hear nothing and see very little but he felt sure that he and the others had been accurately pinpointed by the Wolves.

	Quit calling them that, he thought, You're getting to believe Mazzechazz too much and too hard

	And where was that reptilian conman? Why, back on the ship, since he would be useless in this human problem and would merely confuse the issue for the Arghor minds.

	Artificially preoccupied with such reflections, Powers was taken by surprise by the coming of the dawn. Almost without warning visibility became unlimited. As the rim of the giant sun poked above the horizon he lowered his gaze and squinted. Unconsciously, he and the other men began to draw slowly together, their eyes shuttling to the dark forest.

	"There they come—" A young settler, pale but determined, stopped pretending to hoe and pointed. Shading his eyes, Powers saw the line of black dots break out of the forest and move rapidly toward them.

	"Remember," he shouted, "they can kill us in seconds if you don't obey orders and do what you've been taught. Have faith!"

	"As a priest myself, Agent, in a case like this, perhaps I should be above fear." Presbyter Tahira had moved close to Powers and-spoken in a low tone of voice but his eyes twinkled and he seemed quite calm.

	The Arghor were now only a hundred yards away, and suddenly the blazing dawn's quiet was shattered by a concerted howl.

	The warrior nearest to Powers was now charging, heavy, stone-tipped spear drawn back in one hairy arm. Others who had outstripped their fellows were about to fall upon Tahira and his eighteen Templars.

	"Now!" shouted Powers.

-

	INSTANTLY everyone, including Powers himself, dropped to the ground. The men lay flat on their backs, knees drawn up to protect their stomachs, backs arched and arms extended at full length on the ground. All bent their heads back, so that their straining throats were exposed to the sky above. In this posture, eyes wide open, they waited for the enemy.

	By rolling his eyes, Powers could see the six-foot, black-furred warrior who had been about to skewer him stop a few yards away, dumbfounded, fanged jaws agape. Un-moving, Powers watched the Arghor approach, spear drooping, until he stood over Powers' body, his rank odor a pungent reminder of alienness.

	"What is this skyfolk madness?" the Arghor growled. "Get up and fight, die like a warrior, skyman?"

	Powers remained frozen in his strange posture. The Arghor raised his spear as if to strike and suddenly shrieked horribly. Somehow Powers managed not to flinch. The Arghor stopped screaming. Staring at Powers, he yelped with frustration, shaking his hairy head from side to side and doing a little dance of sheer rage.

	"Get up and die," he howled again, dancing in a circle. Powers could hear a similar and deafening chorus all around him. It was music to his numbed ears. He allowed himself a small smile. His neck muscles ached from the upward jut of his throat and chin but he could hold the cramped posture a long time if he had to do so. So, he was sure, could the others. Now that they realized it was actually working, they could hold it all day, spurred on by success.

	His own screaming Arghor suddenly stood squarely over his body, furry legs straddling Powers. Growling horribly and wordlessly, the savage fumbled with his leather breechclout.

	By God, Sakh even predicted this ...

	Powers then closed his eyes tightly. The ultimate insult and also the ultimate award for success. The prize for cunning was hardly pleasant but it was a far cry from death or defeat. He waited, honest laughter exploding deep in his body, but outwardly as rigid as ever, for the final and irrevocable gesture of contempt.

-

	AS THE Farover bored through ^its first subspace jump on its return trip to Sirius Prime the two agents relaxed, each in his own way. The ship was on automatic and its computer could take care of almost any emergency imaginable.

	Stripped of his harness, Sakh Mazzechazz was going over his body inch by inch with a tiny battery-operated buffer, polishing his minute scales until his whole yellowish green body gleamed and shimmered in the light.

	"You must have a date," said Powers.

	Equally relaxed, he had been transcribing notes for his own private records. Now he put down his recorder and turned his gaze on the Lyran.

	"I said, you must have a date. Am I right?"

	"A young female from my delegation's staff on Prime Base has brought me messages from the nearer members of my clan. It is only natural that I hear them in the proper atmosphere of privacy. Otherwise proper reverence would not be displayed."

	"Yes," agreed Powers. "You mean you have a date."

	"That's right," said the Lyran.

	His red goggle eyes met Powers' and the transparent membrane flickered up and down rapidly in an uproarious laugh.

	Powers smiled. "You deserve a date," he said quietly. "As a matter of fact, you deserve a medal. Not that you'll ever get one, pal. Mind telling me the background of your wizardry back there on Wolf World? You said the clues that gave you the idea were from my own racial history, I know, but we had no time to go into it in any detail."

	"A small matter, Williams, hardly worth discussion. It will be in the report and you can read it later back at H.Q."

	"Ah, ah," said Powers. "Play fair, Lizard face, I know how modest you pretend to be but this time don't bother. I want a story. Let the backroom boys read it at H.Q. You just tell Daddy in simple language."

	The Lyran's gular pouch suddenly swelled out into a great, bluish fan under the long, thin jaws. The sight was a frightening one to someone unaccustomed to his race. The gesture meant absolutely nothing, as a matter of fact, being purely vestigial and used perhaps as a yawn or stretch in a human.

	"Very well," said Mazzechazz, "since you are so insistent. But it hardly bears telling. When the human governor, the priest Tahira, spoke of the Arghor as 'wolves', something clicked in my mind. Somewhere, long ago, I had seen a reference, perhaps far back in time, as a young student. It was to the Terran carnivorous animals called by this name. The reference, too, must have lain in some sphere of my own interest, which, as you know, mainly comprises alien psychology and things related to it.

	"The Lyran mind, organized as it is, must reject useless information and store usable data only. This reference then must lie in the latter category. I therefore put myself in a trance state while you listened to the history and the hysterics of the governor and his council, and isolated the reference, as well as several related to it—and others still more remote but bearing on the general subject. The matter of recall under such conditions requires training, of course. But it was not so hard as the time I—"

	"Never mind past triumphs," growled Powers. "Stick to Wolf World."

	"If you insist, Softskin. Your own education may even be raised an infinitesimal notch. Unliklier things have happened." He neatly ducked a seat cushion and went on talking. "Long, long ago on Terra, before your first Global Interregnum, the science of behavioral psychology, which even I must admit, you excel in, was still in its infancy. Certain of your early scientists, led by a man named Lorenz, postulated that rules of behavior which rigidly governed the lower animals also might affect human beings. The fact that Lorenz and the others had barely begun even to discover the basic rules which governed the lower animals made their work very difficult.

	"But they persevered. One of them, whose name I never memorized, having no reason to, was working with Canis lupus, the wolf, the ancestor of all the dogs and doglike things you humans carry about with you to this day as pets and guardians. This person discovered that a pack-living carnivore such as the wolf is the most rule-bound, other-structured animal in creation. It has to be. If it were not, the race it represents would perish. The rules are simple but unbreakable and they go as follows:

1) Females and young of its race may not be attacked unless the young are approaching maturity. Then the adult pack leaders may expel them.

2) Territories are inviolate and may not be entered without elaborate ceremonial and ritual between packs.

3) Any members of the same species, that is, a wolf which exposes its vital organs, such as the throat and belly, and refuses to fight may not be harmed.

	"The last rule is perhaps the strongest of all. Note, William, that these rules are common sense for a carnivorous animal. Omnivores and herbivores, such as you and I, can kill our own species with ease. In the case of my planet, a world government came mercifully early, you know the unhappy and bloody history of your own before the Syrian Combine discovered Terra and compelled you to seek membership.

	"But a true carnivore can only kill on a very small scale. Any male Grawm would have to have a civilization a billion Standard revolutions old to overcome the inbred inhibitions against total war upon his own species. Fighting other males for sexual reasons, small-scale raids for prestige, Tor sport really, all these things, yes. But killing the young, the aged, the females and above all those who will not fight back, never! He can't do it. The pack leader can kill any pack member. This is because he is the strongest and the wisest, the most cunning in battle. Those below him do not fight back when he punishes. It would be interesting to know what happens to old leaders! I think I can guess, however.

	"Once I had recalled all; this I examined, mentally and physically, a Grawm male. It then became a simple matter to set up a construct and a field problem. And of course it worked, because my examination proved my theoretical postulate to be more than ap-proximate. It was more exact than I could believe."

	"Irritating though it is to' agree with you, I'm afraid you're right," said Powers.

	"You were so right," he went on, "that when that hairy buck standing over me relieved himself I almost wanted to yell, 'Not me, Mazzechazz did it!' You told me that this was a probable gesture of utter contempt among such a species and it certainly was."

	"The extrapolation for such an action was only sixty-five percent, allowing for the differences in intelligence and culture between Grawm as a higher species, and wolves," said the Lyran. "I was lucky."

	"I wasn't." Powers grinned. "But even that kind of bath wasn't. much of a price, I agree, not for what we got. Once they realized that the twenty males they had pinned down wouldn't move, wouldn't fight, they sent for the big chiefs. It took .quite a while but there was no real problem. I simply made it plain that we were non-fighters. That all the fighters had been killed in the big raid and that we would never send any more. That we were cowering behind the colony walls trying to think of a way to tell them this.

	"They were almost physically ill when I finished. In a generation, maybe, the Propaganda boys can start a little work of an underhand kind and begin to civilize them. Meanwhile, they want no part of any human.

	"Now," he went on, stretching lazily, "we can forget about the Arghor Confederacy—or any Grawm as a problem. Every colonist will be taught as an infant to flop on his or her back, throat exposed, the minute a male Grawm appears. I strongly suspect that all the Arghor villages will change location to miles away from the settlement—and very quickly at that. The sense of disgust, the sheer revulsion, at being located near a colony of non-fighting males must be hideously strong.

	"I am incapable of truly appreciating—or should I say feeling mammalian emotion, as you know," said Mazzechazz. "I would not have risked this operation without your approval despite all my theory."

	"The minute you suggested it I knew it would work," said Powers. "These Arghor aren't so very far from my own ancestors in a lot of ways. The main problem, of course, the real risk, was a rather subtle one. Did the Grawm species, specifically the Arghor, despite their hatred and contempt for us, feel we were their spiritual equals? If they didn't, if they saw us a weird but lower form of animal, then all bets were off. Things could have been different. The wolf inhibition against killing only applies to one's own kind, not to rabbits or deer. That was the only real chance we had to take. Your figures said it was an extremely good chance, so I took it and persuaded the others to take it as well."

	"Actually," the Lyran began, "actually you took no chance at all." He appeared in some impossible way, embarrassed at what he was saying. Finally, after looking at a bulkhead, he stared his partner in the eye, using one- of his own periscope orbs, head turned sideways.

	"I had a needle-beam laser on electronic reflex aimed at your particular assailant, William. Had he moved one wrong muscle and I know to a millimeter which they are—the telltales, I mean—he would have died at once. So would the others."

	Powers was horrified. "My god, that would have violated the major Prime Directive! Are you crazy? How would you have explained it later?"

	The Lyran's membranes flickered up and down over the great red eyes.

	"Oh," he said. "I would have thought of something. I am too lazy and too conservative to become accustomed to a new partner, you see. It has nothing, of course, to do with sentiment."

	Powers looked hard at the Lyran and then himself glanced away at a sealed port.

	"Yes," he said. "I see."

The End